Investigating the Psalms

The psalms are weighing on me after two days with the Liturgy of the Hours. I am testament to their lure, yet their language often eludes me. All the prostrating to “Lord,” hating adversaries and accusations of sin deter me. All the references to Israel and Zion confound me with their seeming lack of relevance in my life. Oh, that out of Zion would come the salvation of Israel! (53:7) These are words and ideas from another time, another culture, another political reality than mine.

But I won’t give up. I tried and tried to read William Faulkner to no avail until my brother said, “Don’t read his writing word for word but let the words wash over you.” And with that advice I plowed through four or five Faulkner novels one winter, finding the stories alive and searing in my living room. I feel the same possibility for the literature of the psalms.

Kathleen Norris suggests, “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation in praise.” But still I question basing daily—hourly, prayer on so much pain and judgment. What we put into ourselves, our sustenance, matters. Television, junk food, the fixation on tragedy in the nightly news, these affect our chemical and psychological (and spiritual) makeup. I’m not advocating denial of anger or pain at all, but just wondering how these particular writings might or might not benefit us today.

And yet if I change the word Lord to Love, the power of this poetry grips me and won’t let me go:

O, [Love] to you I call; hasten to me;

hearken to my voice when I call upon you.

Let my prayer come like incense before you;

the lifting up of my hands, like the evening sacrifice.

Should semantics matter?

Of the Hours

At Gethsemani, the monks follow the Liturgy of the Hours, as do most Christian monastic orders. This is the official set of daily prayers and consists of singing the Psalms, hymns, and readings. As I wandered the grounds, journaling, napping, taking photos, or simply being in awe of my surroundings, the church bell continually brought my attention back toward a central point, my faith. The bells, distinct beautiful sounds that they are, ring on the hour, quarter hour and half hour, and have particular purpose notifying the community that a liturgy is due to begin. The monks begin their prayer at 3:15am and meet nine times for prayer throughout the day. I found the continual coming together: the bell tolling, people gathering one by one, the simple singing and prayer to be a dynamic routine. Eventually I looked forward to the bell and the repetition of sounds I would find in the choir.

The Liturgy of the Hours, in their full yearly cycle, is based on the Psalms, which happen to be the poetic verse of the Old Testament. These verses are much lauded in Judeo-Christian culture and it’s easy to see why; the power and aliveness that exudes from them endures. Still I find their language daunting and archaic, so that when I follow the words precisely I get caught up in analyzing and disliking them. They are not the words I want to pray, even as I recognize their significance in relaying the human condition of suffering and despair:

I am like water poured out;

all my bones are racked.

My heart has become like wax

melting away with my bosom.

My throat is dried up like baked clay,

my tongue cleaves to my jaws;

The metaphors are rich, virile, and sometimes difficult to penetrate:

You have exalted my horn like the wild bulls

you have anointed me with rich oil.

And my eye has looked down upon my foes,

and my ears have heard of the fall

of my wicked adversaries.

But when I let their song wash over me and stop thinking so much, but just exist in the words, I experience a tender surrender. This kept me coming back to every liturgy when I was present on the grounds, and kept me late (7:30pm) on a windy, cold day for the final liturgy, Compline.

Compline is the end of the day, the night prayer. The closing hymns and prayers are particularly sweet to the ear and heart. The monks sing on into the growing darkness,

May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.

Silence

Religion as storytelling, images, and rituals may simply be the poetry of faith—the allegories, metaphors, verse, meter and rhyme that give relatable witness to our experience of the Divine. This poetry can succeed in giving meaningful, but limited, glimpses of our most sacred understandings even as it fails to adequately replicate the glorious whole, which is unexplainable and mostly unfathomable. The truest revelation of the Unfathomable is silence.

At the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, the Trappist monks there are practicing silence among their daily routine of contemplation, work, and prayer. On Gethsemani’s thousands of acres, silence emanates from every sunlit branch and red-haired squirrel, even with the loudness of cars blowing by on the highway that traverses their land. And in the choir of their liturgy, silence penetrates between every word they sing of the Psalms.

Sitting in the rear of the empty church, all white painted brick, stone, golden oak and stained glass of yellow, grey, green, I find the silence endures as a lack that seems like the ultimate richness. There I discover the paradox of silence, what the Buddhists call Emptiness, that it contains everything, that it is rich beyond all comprehension. So that silence is intimate reckoning with the unknowable, unnameable, indescribable All.

I'm headed to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky tomorrow. Poet,writer, and activist Thomas Merton, aka Fr. Louis, lived his monastic life there. I'll share more on this next week...

(Photo: John Cremons)